Four Statistically-Proven Ways To Identify Weirdos On A First Date

For those of you who still believe in pastel hearts and Taylor Swift songs, the statisticians at OKcupid have come up with a winning first-date strategy. It's a list of questions that are statistically proven to suggest key details about your unknown dinner companion without making things too awkward.

Here's the methodology that OKCupid used to come up with its definitive list:

To determine "What questions are easy to bring up, yet correlate to the deeper, unspeakable, issues people actually care about," OKCupid began by pulling from its database of 275,294 user-submitted match questions.

Dissecting the Pool: the little blue square is the "Safe-Zone."OKTrends

This pool of questions was then separated into "viable first-date questions"—mostly to eliminate queries like "Are clams alive?" and "Are you better looking than most people?"

The list of "viable first-date questions" was then broken down by privacy (based on whether or not users clicked "Answer Question Privately" when asked the question online) and diversity of answers.

The ideal questions were those that people did not consider private (i.e. casual topics) and led to a high diversity of answers (i.e. tells you something about the person).

IF YOU WANT TO KNOW: Do My Date And I Have Long-Term Potential?

BECAUSE: Of all questions appropriate to a first date, the three listed above were the ones couples most often agreed on.

When someone deletes their OkCupid account, they havethe option of giving a reason, and if that reason is "I met somebody on OkCupid," they can provide their significant other's username. Many hundreds of people a day go through the trouble of doing this, so OKCupid has compiled an excellent dataset of real-world couples. Agreement on these three questions correlated best to an actual relationship.

In fact, 32% of successful couples agreed on all of them—which is 3.7 times the rate of simple coincidence. These questions as a trio even out-performs OkCupid's top three user-rated match questions.

IF YOU WANT TO KNOW: Do My Date And I Have The Same Politics?

BECAUSE: This one question very strongly predicts a person's ideas on these divisive issues:

Should burning your country's flag be illegal?

Should the death penalty be abolished?

Should gay marriage be legal?

Should Evolution and Creationism be taught side-by-side in schools?

In each case, those who prefer complexity are 65-70% likely to give the Liberal answer. Those who prefer simplicity are 65-70% likely to give the Conservative one.

This correlation is for a nationwide dataset; it won't be as useful in places where one ideology is much more prevalent than the other. For example, in New York City there are lots of people who like simplicity but have Liberal politics.

IF YOU WANT TO KNOW: Is My Date Religious?

BECAUSE: If your date answers "no"—i.e. is OK with bad grammar and spelling—the odds of him or her being at least moderately religious is slightly better than 2:1.

Last summer, OKCupid analyzed the profile text of half a million user profiles, comparing religion and writing-level. For every one of the faith-based belief systems listed, the people who were the least serious wrote at the highest level.